The Imaginary Museum: Monuments and Landmarks

Call for images relating to monuments and landmarks as part of Heritage Show + Tell: this call is now closed.

The Imaginary Museum has been produced in response to the tradition of artists and theorists interrogating the museum archive format to investigate and expose the politics of collection and display. In direct response to the theories of Andre Malraux, Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, the project aims to understand and communicate the ways that art history is made, and how artists engage with the collection and categorisation of art.

Directly referencing the work of André Malraux, in the first volume of ‘The Psychology of Art’ entitled ‘The Museum without Walls’, the concept of the project began with the idea of photographic reproduction in books as the basis for the democratisation of visual art. The project is curated by Louise Atkinson and is a continuation of earlier versions of the concept, which were held at The Tetley, Leeds in March 2014, and Leeds College of Art as part of their Library Interventions project.

This iteration of The Imaginary Museum focuses on images of, and responses to, monuments and landmarks. These kinds of objects are indicative of cultural placemaking, featuring elements of local and global iconography.

Projects such as The Fourth Plinth Programme in Trafalgar Square invite artists to respond to the idea of the monument through large scale sculptural and installation methods. The Imaginary Museum: Monuments and Landmarks takes this prospect one step further through turning the object back into a postcard image to be collected and distributed in the manner of tourist sights.

The ‘museum’, displayed on a postcard wall rack, will be a series of 18 postcard reproductions selected from an open call. The audience will be able to select from the postcards, in part or in whole, by leaving a suggested donation in a nearby honesty box. There will also be small branded envelopes for audiences to keep their selection in, thereby creating their own imaginary museum.

The postcard rack will be displayed alongside the 2 July edition of Heritage Show + Tell at Leeds City Museum.

Following the exhibition, each of the images and texts provided by the artists will be collected in the form of an artist’s book which will also include an essay about the exhibition. This will also be issued to the artists involved. Images and texts will also be featured on the project website.

See here for information regarding how to apply. The deadline for submissions is 22 May 2015.

For images from the previous Imaginary Museum project, see here.

The Imaginary Museum: Monuments and Landmarks is produced with generous support from the Centre for Practice-led Research in the Arts, University of Leeds.